Greene on Capri

by Shirley Hazzard

  Graham completed substantial portions of his books during visits to Capri. On the evening of 18 October 1978, in a short, graceful speech accepting honorary citizenship from the municipality of Anacapri, he told an invited audience in the baroque church of San Michele that, at the Rosaio, “in four weeks I do the work of six months elsewhere.” Capri itself, however, was never an immediate source for his fiction and is hardly touched on in his memoirs. Giving scant attention to the affairs of the island and its populace, he was still less concerned with the phenomenon of living in Italy. The courtesy and obligingness of most Italians were largely taken for granted—but these, too, contributed to the ease and freedom within which he worked.

  The ancient city of Naples, across the bay, never drew Graham’s interest; and would have been viewed as a teeming potential distraction. He learned no Italian: “Never having managed French in all these years, I thought it useless to start on another language.” He read fluently in French, but read Italian in translation only. He had learned to give “Capri” its correct emphasis, on the first syllable. (The mispronunciation “Capree” presumably derives from the once popular song about “The Isle of Capree,” whose tune still brays forth from souvenir stalls around the bay.) If he had ever learnt of the old dialect name, “Crapa,” by which the island was once known to its inhabitants, I think we would have heard about it.

  Cyril Connolly, a contemporary of Graham’s youthful literary life in London, sought to distinguish

  between the flight of the expatriate which is an essential desire for simplification . . . and the brisker trajectory of the travel addict, trying not to find but to lose himself in the intoxication of motion.

  I think that Graham had at one time been impelled by both those urges, and, more darkly, by his wish to test the dangerous margins of his world; but that addiction and intoxication had, with age, been diluted by indifference. The round trip ticket of the jet era, in making the travel trajectory dramatically brisker, had eroded those elements of risk and rigour that once sent Graham on lonely journeys to enigmatic places. What had previously gone unperceived and unreported was becoming the shared province of group travel. Graham’s trips—to Central and Latin America, to central and South Africa, to Russia—grew systematic, prompted in the 1950s by a need to exchange one kind of unhappiness for another; and, later, by the lure of political ferment and of themes for a new book. All was interspersed with the odd yet unfailing return to Capri.

  At the Rosaio, the rhythm of Graham’s days scarcely varied: at work in his studio in the morning; in late afternoon, a walk, perhaps, with Yvonne along the half hour path called the Migliera, which, passing through Anacaprese countryside, ends in a spectacular drop of limestone cliffs at the western tip of the island. At evening, down by bus to the town of Capri for a drink in the piazza, and the accustomed dinner at Gemma. The islanders, if they recognised him, were discreet, as were most tourists—respecting his privacy, possibly sensing his aloofness not only from undesired attention but from the ambience itself. Official attempts to claim him as a votary, in Capri’s artistic tradition, foundered on that detachment: he was never a local phenomenon, an intimate of the place and its community. Visibly present on Capri, he had no air of belonging.

  None of which hindered Graham from pronouncing, from time to time, on what he conceived to be the island’s social and political moods.

  In the late 1970s, Francis and I were approached by Raffaele Vacca, a member of Anacapri’s municipal council, regarding the community’s wish to offer honorary citizenship to Graham Greene. Vacca, the author of this genial suggestion, asked if we would forward the idea for Graham’s consideration; and this we succinctly did, emphasising that we were merely conveying a message—but aware that Graham, soon to reach Capri, would not lose this opportunity of punishing the messenger who brought the good news.

  Graham, arriving, immediately and outrageously berated us for “involving” him in community affairs. This was utterly unreasonable, and we said so. Francis told him, “Since you feel this way, I can’t see why you don’t just say no.” It was clear that Graham would accept his honorary citizenship after extracting as much mayhem as possible from the prospect. The ceremony—held, at Graham’s request, at evening in the eighteenth-century church of San Michele, not far from the Rosaio, without press or publicity and in the presence of an invited audience—was simple, dignified, sincere. Graham ceased grumbling, made his fine little speech, and was glad. A plaque, placed on the Rosaio wall, after Graham’s death, by the Axel Munthe Foundation and others, was removed at the insistence of neighbors.

  Among the multiple causes of Graham’s disconnection from Italian scenes one might count his unconcern with aesthetic pleasures important to many who visit the peninsula. Evelyn Waugh, who, in the aftermath of the Second World War, regretted having neglected Europe during his youthful travels of the 1920s and ’30s, later wrote that restless young British writers of his generation had deludedly imagined that

  Europe could wait. There would be time for Europe . . . These were the years when Mr. Peter Fleming went to the Gobi Desert, Mr. Graham Greene to the Liberian hinterland; Robert Byron . . . to the ruins of Persia. We turned our back on civilisation. Had we known, we might have lingered . . . Had we known that all that seeming-solid, patiently built, gorgeously ornamented structure of Western life was to melt overnight like an ice castle . . . Instead, we set off on our various stern roads; I to the Tropics and the Arctic . . . At that time it seemed an ordeal, an initiation to manhood.

  There were exceptions to this literary doctrine—among them, the eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor setting out, in 1933, on his immortal walk from Rotterdam to Constantinople.

  Waugh’s regrets for unexperienced revelations of Europe’s cultural twilight between the wars were not necessarily shared by Graham Greene. Closer to Waugh than to any other writer of his time, Graham told us that he “had never had the slightest trouble” with Waugh’s intermittently savage temperament. (An early biographer of Waugh, Christopher Sykes, sheds light on that standoff: “I often saw them together and, due doubtless to the formidable personality of the other, as formidable as his own, I never saw Evelyn misbehave in [Greene’s] presence.”) Although Greene and Waugh were close contemporaries, Graham deferred to Waugh as to an elder and greater writer. His letters to Waugh weirdly verge, at times, on the reverential.

  Once, discussing with enthusiasm Martin Stannard’s later biography of Waugh, Graham said, “I’m astonished at what a bad soldier Evelyn was.” His admiration for Waugh’s satirical novels never faltered.

  While the beauty of women inflamed and antagonised Graham for most of his life, impressions of works of art, or of the ancient monuments and towns of Europe, had little place in his talk or writing. (“Florence bored me”; “Nothing to distract me in Rome”—so Norman Sherry quotes from the love letters to Catherine.) If, in this, too, there was the inveterate unwillingness to be prompted by received opinion, there was also lack of interest. As in many matters, Graham could surprise—by abrupt observation of some bizarre detail of his immediate surroundings, or by mention of some fine sight glimpsed long ago. Once in a while he would echo, as if dutifully, classic comments on the light and colours of Capri; but natural beauty had erratic claim, only, on his attention. In his Asian years, he had written poignantly of Indochinese street scenes—their languor, and their busy exoticism. The paddies and deltas of Vietnam could sporadically hold his writer’s eye as pastoral England had never done. But he almost never spoke to us of a painting or a painter, a piece of music, a composer. To have suggested that he visit a museum, attend an exhibition or a concert, was unthinkable. If he did spontaneously make such departures, they went unmentioned. Our own pleasures of that kind—in the circumstances, rarely touched on—roused no enquiry.

  Capri was an unlikely—one might say, a resplendent—setting for a man largely unmoved by visual experience.

  Graham’s generation in Britain has been charged with
philistine insensibility to visual pleasure. (Waugh himself “sadly confided”—to his friend Anne Fleming—“that he got no pleasure from natural beauty.”) Visual response had not been absent from Graham’s early life; and some interest in pictures apparently revived during the first years with Catherine Walston, who had gradually acquired during her marriage a collection of paintings. If these elements were ultimately excluded by Graham as distractions, one assumes that they had no compelling appeal.

  Graham himself spoke, and has written in his memoirs, of a diminished sense of visual appreciation that, together with a more pervasive apathy, followed his adolescent breakdown and his treatment by Kenneth Richmond in the summer of 1921: “For years, after my analysis, I could take no aesthetic interest in any visual thing: staring at a sight that others assured me was beautiful I felt nothing.” Something of that aloofness evidently lingered.

  Richmond himself—by all reports a man of eccentric opinions and appearance—had strong feeling for the arts. His very peculiarities would have inspired Graham’s trust. He was a spiritualist, a convinced medium, something of a Jungian, something of a Freudian, a psychoanalyst without conventional qualifications, doctrinal methods, or material ambitions. Possessed of preternatural sympathies, he gave, by Graham’s account, inspired care to patients received into his London household. In itself, the release of confiding and the deliverance from school torments into an atmosphere of intelligence and kindness would, as Graham later assumed, have played a main part in his recovery. It was a crucial rescue, and by Graham tenderly remembered. Moreover, it was formative. It was Richmond, even then, who encouraged Graham to write for publication; and who introduced the sixteen-year-old boy to established writers and to editors who not only linked him to the publishing world but who also represented hope.

  In the 1960s, Harold Acton told us that Graham had suffered a loss, a few years earlier, in the death of a psychiatrist—now identified by Norman Sherry as Eric Strauss of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital—whom he had sporadically visited during the suicidal crises prompted by his love for Catherine Walston. (Harold: “It was the ever-revolving Catherine Wheel, you know. There was need to talk to a non-protagonist.” Harold—a fellow Catholic—added, owlish: “I fear the Confessional has failed him there.”) Counselling Graham against analysis, as a process liable to deplete his talent, Strauss for his part formed an attachment to the patient. As did we all.

  When Graham, on several occasions, talked to us about his eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forebears—benign and bizarre, cruel and corrupt, profligate and impenitent—he remarked that, while he had been closely questioned by clinicians about his relations with his parents and his childhood experience, little curiosity had been shown in a vein of recurrent instability and melancholia manifest in his ancestry. Among his examples, he might have included—but did not—his kinsman Thomas Stevenson, a noted Scots inventor who, as recalled in a fine memorial essay by his son Robert Louis, embodied the family characteristics of temper and temperament. Describing his father’s “emotional extremes,” the son concludes: “Love, anger, and indignation shone through him and broke forth in imagery.”

  Graham’s close feeling for Robert Louis Stevenson led him to high resentment against Stevenson’s wife—in his view a predatory and destructive influence on Stevenson’s short life. When Francis once protested that Mrs. S. herself, while an undoubted oddity, had had much to bear, Graham would have none of it: “No, no. She ran him to ground, and she ruled him. She got him out there”—to California and, later, to the South Seas—” and she”—unforgettable grappling gesture, hands outstretched across the table with fingers crooked—“got the hooks in him.” Eyes wild, blue, unblinking.

  “One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand.”

  Norman Sherry tells us that at their first meeting Greene extracted from him a promise to travel to all places around the world visited by Greene himself in the course of his writing career. That had been Graham’s original concept of the biography, before it was agreed that Sherry should tackle the whole story. Faithful to the bargain, Sherry heroically circled the globe, seeking out survivors from Greene’s youthful experiences, confronting some of the same dangers, contracting certain of the same diseases, and—again, like Graham—nearly expiring in the fruitful process. Had Graham enjoined his biographer to read, rather, the countless thousands of books, celebrated or obscure, that fuelled his life, thought, and work, consoled and informed his passions, and caused him, as he said, “to want to write,” that request would have been absurd, unfeasible, and entirely apposite.

  Literature was the longest and most consistent pleasure of Graham’s life. It was the element in which he best existed, providing him with the equilibrium of affinity and a lifeline to the rational as well as the fantastic. The tormented love affairs of adult years—and, supremely, the long passion for Lady Walston—brought him to the verge of insanity and suicide. It was in reading and writing that he enjoyed, from early childhood, a beneficent excitement and ground for development of his imagination and his gift: an influence contrasting with that of his undemonstrative parents. Our own best times with Graham usually arose from spontaneous shared pleasures of works and words—those of poets and novelists above all—that were central to his being and ours.

  During the Second World War, an essay by Graham Greene on British dramatists appeared in a series of monographs by well-known writers on aspects of English literature: poetry, novels, histories, diaries, drama, philosophy. The essays were soon collected in a fine illustrated edition of rational dimensions (we had no premonition, then, of mastodontic coffee-table tomes), which I, as a schoolgirl, bought in 1946—smuggling it home to avoid trouble, since it had cost thirty-two shillings of saved pocket money, and the flourish of independence was bound to cause a fuss. Turning the pages now, with their clear print and smell of good paper, and their knotted threads drawn from a stitched spine, is to relive the hot morning in the bookshop, the teetering stacks on mahogany tables, the trip home on the ferry; and an ecstasy of reading that dazzled the eyes. Those pages exude, also, the mildewed and still Conradian Orient to which, within months, that book and others accompanied me—the es sayists shedding, even yet, flecks of pressed flowers from a hillside in south China. The book’s illustrations, glossless, some of them in faithful colour, were my introduction to the miniatures of Isaac Oliver, to portraits by Kneller and Sir Thomas Lawrence, theatre scenes by Zoffany; to Alexander Pope by Charles Jervas, a flaring G.B.S. by Augustus John, and Sargent’s Byronic drawing, in charcoal, of the youthful Yeats.

  The essays are by practitioners of the first rank—“creative writers,” as they would be designated today. The wool of obsessive theory and deconstructive jargon had not yet been pulled over the reader’s eyes and senses—although Elizabeth Bowen opens her contribution, on novelists, by quietly signalling the danger:

  Too much information about great novels may make us less spontaneous in our approach to them . . . It would be sad to regard as lecture room subjects books that were meant to be part of life.

  Immediacy is more drastically celebrated in Graham’s chapter on the dramatists. In the Elizabethan pit,

  the frequenters of bear baiting demanded vitality: men and women who had watched from their windows the awful ritual of the scaffold were ready for any depth of horror the playwright cared to measure.

  Greene’s essay seethes with the magic of the plays and a sense of fellowship with their authors. There is lucidity, knowledge, a vigorous rapture and mastery of the material, conveyed through Graham’s remarkable ear and in his clear, original language:

  “Think, we had mothers,” Troilus’s bitter outburst is not poetry in any usually accepted meaning of the word—it is simply the right phrase at the right moment, a mathematical accuracy as if this astonishing man could measure his words against our nature in a balance sensitive to the fraction of a milli
gramme.

  Similarly, Flaubert, at work on Madame Bovary:

  Poetry is as precise as geometry.

  Graham himself expresses a Flaubertian recoil from stately excess. “Those immense rhetorical sentences” of the classical emulations that immediately preceded the free Elizabethans “lie over the drama like the folds of a heavy toga, impeding movement.” Conversely, in polished plays of the Restoration, “the monstrous wig, the elegant cane, the flutter of lace handkerchiefs disguise their speed and agility.” Throughout the essay, there is the author’s relish of the sensuality and “the huge enjoyment” of great and accurate expression, and of breathtaking quotations that sent the reader, for a lifetime, not to the explicators and interpreters, but to the works and the words:

  if heart’ning Jove

  Had, from his hundred statues, bid us strike,

  And at the stroke click’d all his marble thumbs.

  One evening, when I spoke of pleasure in Graham’s Dramatists, he said that he had completed the piece on board ship, in a wartime convoy circuitously moving, over weeks, towards West Africa—without reference books or light at night, and between turns at submarine and aircraft watch. (Extracts from Graham’s journal of that voyage, which appear in his collection In Search of a Character, are also invoked in Ways of Escape, where he mentions discovery, in the ship’s library, of a thriller by Michael Innes that prompted his own Ministry of Fear.) He told us that, in addition to a trunk of books reserved for his coming months in Africa, he had brought, for shipboard reading, several long works he had never previously opened; and that one of those was War and Peace.

  “When I finished it, I felt, What’s the use of ever writing again—since this has been done. The book was like some great tree, always in movement, always renewing itself.”